Listening Comprehension Theoretical Review

17 b. The Nature of Listening Comprehension Listening comprehension is a process which involves many other sub-skills that should be done by listeners to interpret meaning of the utterances they hear. Newmark 1981: 39 in Nation and Newton 2009: 38 states that “a comprehension approach can work as long as the material presented for comprehension in fact consists of 1 sufficient 2 language instances 3 whose meaning can be inferred by students 4 who are paying attention ”. Gary and Gary 1981 in Nation and Newton 2009 propose some benefits of delaying speaking and concentrating on listening. First, the learner will not be overloaded by having to focus on two or more skills at the same time a cognitive benefit. Second, receptive knowledge grows faster than productive knowledge speed of coverage. Third, it is easy to move very quickly to realistic communicative listening activities increasing learner motivation. Fourth, learners will not feel shy or worried about their language classes. Furthermore, it can lessen the stress in language learning a psychological benefit. Fifth, listening activities are suitable to independent learning by listening through recordings. However, many critics argue that it is not sufficient to focus only on the receptive skills. Therefore, productive skills, especially speaking, should also be considered as the important factors for supporting language learning. Listening comprehension is not regarded as a passive activity. Vandergrift 1999: 168 in McDonough and Shaw 2003 defines listening comprehension as a complex, active process which the listener must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and structures, interpret stress and intonation, retain what was gathered in all of above, and interpret it within the immediate as well as the larger sociocultural context of the utterance. Co-ordinating all this involves a great deal of mental activity on the part of the learner. 18 Listening is very important for language learners because it provides inputs for developing both language competence and performance. The teaching of listening in the classroom has a significant influence to the learners. Teachers need to consider some factors related to teaching listening. Rost 1990 in Carter and Nunan 2001: 11 states that the teaching of listening involves the selection of input sources live or recorded and audio or video, the chunking of inputs into segments for presentation, and an activity cycle for learners to engage in. The selection of audio input and the design of activities can determine the learning outcomes. Rost defines effective teaching of listening as the teaching which involves careful selection of input sources appropriately authentic, interesting, varied, and challenging, creative design of tasks well-structured, with opportunities for learners to activate their own knowledge and experience and to monitor what they are doing, assistance to help learners enact effective listening strategies metacognitive, cognitive, and social, and integration of listening with other learning purposes with appropriate links to speaking, reading, and writing. Krashen 1981 as cited in Nation and Newton 2009 states the importance of Comprehensible Input CI in listening. The comprehensible input can be transformed into some conditions that are required for language development through listening. The conditions are abbreviated into “MINUS”. It stands for Meaningful, Interesting, New items, Understanding, and Stress-free. c. Micro-skills of Listening To develop the listening skills, it is necessary to understand about micro- skills of listening comprehension. Richards 1983 in Brown 2001 has presented seventeen micro-skills of listening comprehension. 19 Table 2.1. Micro-skills of Listening Comprehension 1. Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory. 2. Discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English. 3. Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, intonational contours, and their role in signalling information. 4. Recognize reduced forms of words. 5. Distinguish word boundaries, recognize a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their significance. 6. Process speech at different rates of delivery. 7. Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other performance variables. 8. Recognize grammatical word classes nouns, verbs, etc, systems tense, agreement, pluralization, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms. 9. Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor constituents. 10. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms. 11. Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse. 12. Recognize the communicative functions of utterances according to situations, participants, and goals. 13. Infer situations, participants, goals using real-world language. 14. From events, ideas, etc., described, predict outcomes, infer links and connections between events, deduce causes and effects, and detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification. 15. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings. 16. Use facial, kinesic, body language, and other nonverbal clues, to decipher meanings. 17. Develop and use a battery of listening strategies such as detecting keywords, guessing the meaning of words from context, appeal for help, and signaling comprehension of lack thereof. The aspects above can be a guidance for teachers to determine the objectives of the listening activities. Besides, the lists can be testing criteria on the evaluation of the activities. Teachers can select specific micro-skills of which the learners should focus on. d. Types of Listening Strategies Successful listeners are influenced by the strategies they use when listening. These strategies refer to the ways in which a learner approaches and manages a task. 20 Buck 2001: 104 in Richards 2008 identifies two kinds of listening strategies, namely cognitive strategies and metacognitive stategies. Cognitive strategies refer to mental activities related to comprehending and storing input in working memory for later retrieval. Metacognitive strategies refer to conscious or unconscious mental activities to manage the cognitive strategies. The classification of the strategies can be seen in the following table. Table 2.2. Two Kinds of Listening Strategies Cognitive Strategies Metacognitive Strategies  Comprehension processes: the processing of linguistic and nonlinguistic input  Storing and memory processes: the storing of linguistic and nonlinguistic input in working memory or long-term memory  Using and retrieval processes: accessing memory to be readied for output  Assessing the situation: analyzing the conditions surrounding a language task by assessing one’s own knowledge, internal and external resources, and the constraints of the situation before engaging in a task  Monitoring: determining the effectiveness of one’s own or another’s performance while engaged in a task  Self-evaluating: determining the effectiveness of one’s own or another’s performance after engaging in a task  Self-testing: testing oneself to determine the effectiveness of one’s own language use or the lack thereof Furthermore, Rost 2002: 155 as cited in Nunan 2003 mentions some strategies that are used by successful listeners, namely: predicting, inferring, monitoring, clarifying, responding, and evaluating. Effective listeners predict by thinking about what they will hear. Meanwhile, inferring means “listening between the lines”. Monitoring is done by noticing what listeners do and do not understand. Then, listeners cl arify the message they hear by asking questions, such as “What does ____ mean?” and giving feedback, like “Sorry, I don’t understand yet” to the 21 speaker. Responding is done by reacting to what listeners have heard. The last strategy i.e. evaluating is to check how well they have understood the message. Teachers can help learners listen more effectively by teaching them about purposes for listening. Brown 2006 mentions three main purposes of listening, namely listening for main ideas, listening for details, and listening and making inferences. By understanding the purposes of listening, learners will be able to focus on why they listen and decide which skills or strategies to be applied to listen better. e. Listening Comprehension for Senior High School Grade X The change of curriculum in Indonesia gives many impacts to the education system including the language learning at schools. In 2014, the curriculum changed from School Based Curriculum into Competency Based Curriculum or known as Curriculum 2013. It gave a great influence to the teaching learning system at schools. There is a great change related to the time allocation of English subject in Senior High Schools. According to Curriculum 2013, English as a compulsory subject is done two sessions per week. Meanwhile, for students who want to learn further about it should take it as the elective course. There are three elective courses in senior high school, namely Mathematics and Natural Science, Social Science, and Language The Ministry of Education and Culture, 2013. However, in the beginning of 2015 the curriculum has changed again into the previous one i.e. School Based Curriculum or Curriculum 2006. Most schools have applied this curriculum because they face many difficulties after the implementation of Curriculum 2013. Evaluating Curriculum 2013, teachers and students still found many obstacles related to the teaching and learning process. One 22 of the problems is about the assessment system. Teachers did not only assess students’ cognitive skills, but also their spiritual and social attitudes. The difference also lies on the syllabus. Syllabus becomes the basic reference for materials and program design in this research. The materials, including the topics and the learning objectives, are based on competency standards and basic competences of English for Senior High School grade X. In reference with the teaching listening in Senior High School grade X, the competency standard and basic competences are presented in Appendix 1. The listening materials should be derived accordingly from the syllabus. The syllabus becomes the reference in selecting the language functions as well as the text genres that are included in the Android application.

3. Mobile Learning m-learning

Technology has merged with the learning process in the classroom. Dudeney and Hockly 2007 state some reasons why technology is important in language learning. First, it is because the internet access becomes increasingly available to learners. Next, young learners have grown up with technology so it has been integrated with their lives. Furthermore, English has been globally used in technological contexts. Many technical terms are written or spoken in English. Many teachers have moved from the conventional media to the digital ones. Moreover, Senior High School students are adolescents who were born in the digital era who can be considered as “digital native”. According to Dudeney and Hockly 2007, this term refers to someone who grows up using technology and thus feel comfortable and confident with it. On the contrary, many teachers or parents tend 23 to be “digital immigrants” who came late to the world of technology. Therefore, it is necessary for teachers to adapt with the development of technology. In addition, the internet as a signal of technology advance provides many resources of authentic materials. Teachers and learners can easily access them by downloading them via the internet. The internet can also become a means of communication among students in distance. Moreover, technology becomes increasingly mobile. It can be used not only at school during the teaching and learning process, but also elsewhere, outside the classroom, such as at home, on the way, or at the internet cafe. Nowadays, as the advance of technology, people demands more flexible and practical solution for learning. One of the effective ways is by using mobile devices for learning. Before defining mobile learning, firstly it is necessary to understand the nature of learning. a. The Nature of Learning The process of learning occurs to every human being and it varies in term of time, effort, and purpose. There are various definitions of learning proposed by some experts. Driscoll 1994: 8-9 in Newby et al. 2000 defines learning as a “persisting change in human performance or performance potential [brought] about a result of the learner’s interaction with the environment”. Meanwhile, Woofolk 1998: 204 states that learning happens when experience causes a relatively permanent change in an individual’s knowledge or behavior. The similar concept that can be drawn from both definitions is “change”. It can be inferred that to learn means “to change”. Therefore, when people learn, there will be a change of their knowledge, behavior, or performance. 24 Many experts have provided different views of learning. Shambaugh and Magliaro 2006: 5-7 propose three primary approaches of learning, namely: behavioral learning theory, cognitive learning theory, and constructivist learning theory. These three approaches correspond to three metaphors suggested by Mayer 1992 in Shambaugh and Magliaro 2006: 5, namely: learning as response acquisition, learning as knowledge acquisition, and learning as knowledge construction. According to behavioural views, learning is the acquisition of responses to the environment. Learning occurs by numerous responding and immediate reinforcement, thus it is achieved through a habitual formation. The implications should focus on individual progress, content sequencing, analysis of learning task, and assessment keyed to behavior Shambaugh Magliaro, 2006: 5. Meanwhile, cognitive learning learning as knowledge acquisition regards learning as the information-processing model of human memory. The quality of processing determines the memory and recall of new information. The implications of this learning theory are: structure activity, support expert development, learning strategies, organizers, and assessment keyed to performance on activity. Then, according to social constructivist theory knowledge construction, learning should be natural and the responsibility of learning resides primarily with the learner. However, social world and interactions also define the individual knowledge. Some implications of this theory are: share control with students, emergent understandings, authentic activity, peers and adults assist learner, and assessment which includes self-reflection and learner responsibility. 25 b. The Nature of Mobile Learning Mobile learning has undergone some evolution time by time. Formerly, mobile learning has been defined as learning which employs the use of mobile technologies, while recently it begins to focus on the mobility of the learners as well Kukulska-Hulme and Shield, 2008. As stated by Riggs and Vandenbrink 2001, mobile learning, through the use of wireless mobile technologies, allows anyone to obtain learning content from anywhere and anytime”. Learners can have access to the learning materials anywhere - inside or outside the classroom, and anytime – before, during, or after the classroom activities. It depends on how teachers make use of the mobile devices and the learning objectives that want to achieve through the mobile learning. There are some points of view in defining mobile learning. Sharples 2006 proposes some perspectives on mobile learning which are classified into four broad categories, namely technocentric, relationship to e-learning, augmenting formal education, and learner-centered. According to technocentric perspective, mobile learning is defined as learning using mobile devices, such as PDA, mobile phone, iPod, etc. Next, based on the relationship to e-learning, mobile learning is characterized as the extension of e-learning which focuses more on the portability. In addition, Honeyman 1993 proposes distance learning with its subsets. It can be seen in the following figure. 26 Figure 2.2. Distance Learning and its Subsets Distance Learning d- learning is defined as “a process to create and provide access to learning when the source of information and the learners are separated by time or distance, or both” Honeyman, 1993. Formerly, d-learning has many constraints related to time and location restrictions, climate factors, and the limited access because the lesson is delivered via satellite. In the recent years, it relies much on the development of technologies so that the delivery process of knowledge and information is easier than before. Meanwhile, electronic learning e-learning is defined as “learning that takes place using technology, such as the internet, CD- ROMs, and portable devices like mobile phones or MP3 players” Dudeney and Hockly, 2007. Conceptually, e-learning can be divided into online learning and mobile learning m-learning. As defined by Dudeney and Hockly 2007, online learning is learning which takes place via the internet, while m-learning refers to learning which promote the use of mobile phones, MP3 players, Personal Digital Assistants PDAs and use Windows Mobile Computing platforms such as iPAQ Dudeney and Hockly, 2007: 156. Then, from the third point of view i.e. augmenting formal education, mobile learning has correspondence with distance education which are very different from formal education that is stereotyped as